58

The Cross is an intersection of streets in Kaka`ako, is a line of tents in Kalihi, is He`eia stream beside the man on the bike's hutch. A bottle dipped in the stream was all I saw beneath his tarp, old white guitar laid on top. Intention is the mother of empathy, of which there was none. The man with the white guitar plays things we want not to see. He plays for an audience of egrets, of passing trucks pulling boats, of workmen on the bridge. He plays for taro farmers in the valley. He plays for the invasive mangroves, the mountains we cannot remember origins of, the point of land the dead leaped from. He's the still point a surveyer might use to mark the boundaries we've made of this land. He's the story for which there is no arc, no denouement. Ignore him: he's no threat to your commerce or your joy.

Easter Sunday

--5 April 2015